Eldritch Contract Law.

I've been reading a lot of Dresden Files recently and it got me to thinking, between sunbathing with John Rawls and sips of prosecco, that there exists a number of differences in fae contract law that are exploited repeatedly.

Also: Fae can be spelled fey. Or! Fey can be spelled fae, apparently. Additionally: If any readers are left, bravo. Contract law and fairies. If you keep going, you might deserve a Medal of Honor from the internet.

Point is. Fey (fae?) contract law (at least in Dresden Files) is almost exclusively oral, with few written components and most, if not all of the important terms and consequences knowingly obscured by murky language. It's like a deal with the devil. Except the devil is usually female, totally hot and has a court of labyrinthine motivations and aims to keep track of.

And, of course, this court of incredible, accessible power runs on misery, most of the time or at least an intractable web of lies, deceit and half-truths, lorded over by appallingly pretty women with petty worries and apocalyptic schemes. (Makes me wonder who wrote these stories and why.) Wayward, bumbling humans are the the gasoline on which this society runs, and through cunning use of incredibly high stakes and verbal trickery, this position is maintained.

(This is, in case there was ever any question, the opposite of the way any agreement should work.)

Fey bargaining is based, I think, on a loose system of "if I get you to say something when you're bent over a barrel, you're totally liable and I'm in the clear, I just offered you a deal," which we can shorten to bullshit. But supposing we can't shorten it to bullshit, the fae (yes, I'm going back and forth with the names) when pressed will say something to the effect of we had a deal, to which there is an obligation and a tie to that obligation.

Rawls, of course, says that that obligation and that tie presupposes just institutions, or institutions that are as just as can be, given the situation. But, even if we ignore the fey society, there's still one foundational point on contract law that the fae are missing: Informed consent.

Informed consent is basically what the fae contract law runs away screaming from. It means that basically meant to show that all parties agreeing have a minimum understanding of what the terms, consequences and facts are in the agreement, which has never historically been a strong point for fey bargaining. But informed consent is also a goddamned standard of any agreement ever, the basic point that people who are making agreements, need to know, on a deep level, what they are getting into, what they are giving up and what they are getting, which is a standard the fae don't tend to meet.

So: At least on earth, or an agreement signed to here, one would hope our laws apply and not theirs. And if our laws apply, well, their deals might be something you don't have an obligation to keep.

Thus: Here are some ways you can avoid fairy trickery.

1) Don't make deals.
2) No, seriously. Don't.
3) Repeat.
4) Vocalize, explicitly, using the most unequivocal words possible that you want to know exactly what you get and what you give up. And if they don't want to do that, you might know that you have a bad deal. (That said, few people make good deals with the fey.)
5) If you have already made a bargain with the fae, I'm sorry. You're deep in the hole. Try telling them your consent wasn't informed and force the issue. They're a stickler for rules. Maybe this'll help.




If you're reading this and you're involved with fey, then you might not want them reading over your shoulder. I'm not sure about all fae, but hardcore punk seems like it would be a little abrasive for them. Thus, This Is Hell's cover of 108's When Death Closes Your Eyes. Throw that in with some straightforward lyrics about hiding behind words, and well, I'm pretty sure they'll leave you alone. Good luck.

Late! Crazy Late!

I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce Subsidized Sincerity is going to a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday schedule. I'm still going to think of it as Monday, Wednesday, Friday but there's less, say noise, on the internet Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, so I hope it will sit better in the immediate future.

I've been rough on the Dresden Files recently. Admittedly, the third book (Grave Peril) seemed to lean hard on the “darkness is bad, light is good” that's kind of simplistic. There was a guy from the Church (Michael) who has 2.5 kids, works as a carpenter, who carries a sword that may be a nail in the cross of Jesus and a priest that's old, reliable and apparently, churches are safe havens for the people suffering from vampire or demon attacks.

And yes, I'm going to contrast it again with the most recent book by China Mieville that I read. It's called King Rat and apparently, it was his first. It shows. He uses the word impossible too much in describing the titular characters abilities, but what stood out to me was how both books looked at darkness.

In the Dresden Files, the darkness is something to feared. Vampires or fairies or whatever lurk there. In King Rat, the darkness is sheltering. The darkness is useful. The darkness is home.

In the Dresden Files, purity is a thing from which power can be drawn and is spoken well of. There's pure white flame which Michael calls on to battle the dark, dangerous vampires. (At one point, a vampiress, in order to flirt with Michael, touches his arm. She erupts into a “white flame,” and is thrown off of him.) In King Rat, purity is abhorrent. “Purity is a negative state, and contrary to nature.”

I've read four five six Dresden Files books in rapid succession. Mieville's work, less so. Bottom line: Mieville is fucking complicated. Butcher is not. And that's only a partial knock against Butcher. I've laughed far more often at what Butcher puts in front of me.

In Summer Knight alone, we're talking about a book where the police lieutenant takes a chainsaw to the back of a troll's knee (an old Chicago tradition) and then to the head of a plant monster, a book where the day is saved by tiny pixies with box cutters flying out of a vase screaming “In the Name of the Pizza Lord, Charge!”, a book where Harry Dresden throws a cup of cold water on his erection to break out of Fey trickery, it's a book where, here a neutral party to the character describes how everyone else sees the character and it's fucking funny because more of it is true than false.

I love that moment.

I resent Butcher's attempts at epic because I like the magic PI story and I dislike conventionally epic storylines, a three way violent orgy between wizards and fairies and vampires. I like Mieville's attempts at epic because, motherfucker, they feel epic. You've got goddamn squid gods fighting mortals for control of reality using their imaginations as their weapons.

Now that's what I call epic.

Tonight it's Ballots/Stones by Hostage Calm. The recurring lyric is this, and it's a doozy: "Did you cast your ballot or a stone?"

A Storm Front In New Crobuzon

Perdido Street Station is unfamiliar. Storm Front not at all and I like both for those reasons.

Storm Front flaunts its influences on its first chapter, even in its first paragraph. The first paragraph is about how the mailman usually announces himself. See also: The Postman Always Rings Twice. Within the first chapter, we learn working wizard Harry Dresden is a) behind on rent and b) received an evasive female caller that wants to meet him about a missing persons case. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because it's basically the beginning of every noir story ever.

You get introduced to, next, a no bullshit police lieutenant, who needs Dresden to investigate a fresh crime scene. Surprisingly enough, she's a woman, Karrin Murphy. By the second page of the second chapter, Dresden's opened the door for the woman and called himself old school.

By the third chapter, he's been told by the Mafia to keep his nose out of the case, that the mob will “double” whatever the city is paying him to take a vacation for a couple weeks. He says no. (Of course.) There's a sour pub owner that Dresden is on a first name basis with and a voluptuous woman that wants something from him that lets Dresden peek down her shirt in attempt to get information out of him. (After a quick glance, and only that, he reiterates how old-fashioned he is.) He has to meet a vampire, cross basically all of the people who trust him in an attempt to solve the case.

Would you be surprised to find out that the police lieutenant is having her unseen bosses (Commander Fairweather, in case you were wondering) breathe down her neck or that one of the women is playing Dresden? No. No you wouldn't, because it's all shit you've been before.

It's not like the magic is much more astonishing. Maybe you'll surprised to hear that he brews a love potion and doing so blows up in his face? Mostly, magic accounts for the high octane fights and hijinx. Look, a talking skull and an absent-minded fairy to trap!

And yet, I blitzed through Butcher's paperback in two evenings and I'm stoked for the second, third and fourth books. (I suspect by book five or six he's going to be repeating ideas out the ass.) I mean, yes, I'm a total sucker for the genre and this one gets me right in the sweet spot. There's enough hijinks to keep things moving and there's enough twists (not that they're telegraphed, but it wants to be a noir so bad and I know what to look for) that it keeps me happy.

Compare:

Within the first chapter of Perdido Street Station, we see the city from outside in the first person, from a character that's not named or described, on the run from something, and headed toward a brief hope that it might be whole again. You arrive in the city from the first chapter, as you approach it, from the perspective of an outside on a boat coming into the city, hearing only rumors from the nebulous narrator. The first two sentences: Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. Right there, you get a clear sense of coming closer to a city center and that the narrators been traveling for a long time, whether hours, days or weeks, who knows.

In the next chapter, we meet an adorable couple, a female artist (Lin) and a youngish sorcerer (Issac), waking up with each other in their apartment. They wake up together and make breakfast. Issac, the dude, is predictably sleepy and wants to go back to bed. Familiar enough, right? That's when you see, slowly, that Lin has red skin, four pairs of insectoid legs and can't speak, so instead signs. That's before she opens up her head and reveals mandibles, not to mention, tiny delicate wings and that's before she and Issac start having sex, the anatomical possibilities of which Mieville leaves up to our imagination.

Lin, then leaves, because she has to go to work. Again, not really surprising, until you find out that she's going to meet a mysterious buyer that she's certain Issac won't approve of. It's a lucrative commission to do portrait of the lord of organized crime in the city. Yes. The woman gets in trouble and chooses it and, for the record, stays on top of it, until Issac fucks it up. (Not that Issac would know, which I suspect is another theme.) Other main characters are an underworld go-between, a Hutt-esque bartender that the regulars are familiar enough with that they cheerfully order from him.

Let me repeat the comparison: In Storm Front there's a femme fatale that appears in front of the wizened world-weary male narrator and there's hedging. It's probably on the level and it's probably nothing. (Of course it's not, but anyone who likes noir is not everyone who might read the story.) In Perdido, a young female decides she's going to take the chance of working with a crime lord because it will set her up for life and she'll be able to make whatever she wants post-faco and there's no hedging: This shit is dangerous. For Dresden it's enough to get by, for Lin, it's about getting free.

And...after reading Perdido, I wasn't psyched to read the next book in the series. When I finished Storm Front, I was, and this will not surprise you, psyched to read the next one, which, of course, I don't have. And it wasn't because Storm Front had a happy ending and Perdido ended with more movement and running, either. Perdido was exhausting, whereas Storm Front was invigorating. I knew, from the first paragraph of Storm Front, what I was getting into. Perdido, less so. I couldn't go on autopilot for the book or use my knowledge of the genre as a crutch to catch the little references. It surprised me and terrified me in equal measure, and pretty often to boot, so I know I'll be going back to Mieville eventually.

But Butcher? Like popcorn, I want more and I can handle it, right now.

Today's is the Out_Circuit's Across The Light. It has little or nothing to do with the thing, except that it's what I listen to when I need to chill out at night and I just want to be a little ambient. Crossed with Paul Duffield's Signal, I'm de-stressed and ready for sleep.